“Apple!” I insist. But on closer inspection I see I’m mistaken. The apple’s form has changed. I cannot understand why I thought it was a fruit at all. What I took for its mesocarp are the sides of a room. I see a bed, microwave, sink, all a particular shade of crimson that lightens under my gaze until the structure and the minuscule pages inside it glow not red but pink. It’s the room in our peony hotel. All my wild assumptions meet near the perfectly rendered phone book posing supine, miniature pages naked under the swinging lamp.
I experience the peace of a paranoid whose delusions have proved true. “We dated. Even though you were married. Until you left me when I got injured.”
The room pitches as I walk to the door and, still wearing the dress, pull my boots on.
“Who are you?” He latches on to my arm. I am a bird trapped inside another person’s life, sensing its mistake and trying to exit against relentless glass.
“I answered an ad. I have to buy a cheap wedding dress because my grandmother shit all over mine.”
He moves aside. I open the door and step into the hallway.
“Wait!” Ada says. “Payment.”
“Let her have it. We don’t need anything from her.” He gives the word her all he’s got, drawing a boundary around them to imply my worthlessness. He would condescend like this when we dated. But like the apple I’m no longer positive this is the fruit I think it is. His snobbery was never that pronounced, was it? Did arrogance stiffen his shoulders that much? I am misremembering. His eyes didn’t carry that particular sadness in their corners.
At its heart this evening is based on a transaction, goods for sale, and if I leave without paying I’m stealing. I search my bag for cash but my hands won’t work. Bills flutter to the floor. I gather them and hold them out. Neither of them wants to approach me so I leave the cash on the table.
In the hallway I hear her say, “Be safe.”
I descend the stairs and push through the building’s front doors, ask a cab idling in the dark, are you free, anguish trampling my request. The driver throws her high beams on, moves past me to the corner, turns, and vanishes. Goodbye, other life.
I pull my sweater over the flimsy dress and walk down a narrow street, numbed in darkness. Garbage cans are stacked in unlikely formations. The buildings replicate on either side, blurring as they advance into farther dark. I’m shaking with cold and nerves, rejection, the fucked-upedness my grandmother promised.
In my phone I find a picture of us from that time. We pose outside a park wearing black jeans. I’d asked a passerby to take it, knowing even then I was stealing a moment of legitimacy. In private places we were greedy and proprietary, but in public, we had no right to each other. You can tell by his tentative hand, not gripping but placed beside my hip, as if guiding a daughter to shore. The uncertain, elated postures. I can’t decide if the man in the photo blinking into that morning’s sun is the same one who minutes before slammed the door and said, loud enough so I’d hear, “Don’t say be safe to that woman.” I avoid pre-injury photos. What’s the point of being reacquainted with my former body? It’s obvious we’re happy. My smile so pale and winsome I appear floured.
How lucky anyone is to have a friend who has seen all their changes.
Fuck, I think. I have to call my brother.
I dial Adrian, Tom’s manager, who produces his plays and insists on his outrageous riders. He answers quickly, sounding pleased.
“I’m getting married,” I say.
“Am I,” he says, “talking to a bride?”
“An almost bride. In five days.”
I remember how unguarded he is, graciousness rushing the line. “It’s too fast,” he says. “I’m not ready. We’re too young.”
“You might be but I’m not. Thankfully, you’re not aging.”
“I am. You haven’t seen me in years.” I hear an almost imperceptible fleck of sadness.
“It’s been a while. I’d like to hear how my brother is?” I say, as if the thought has just passed on a bus.
He pauses long enough for me to regret the call and the entire life leading up to it. “Thrilling. How about tomorrow night?” Concern—whether for me or Tom I don’t know—underlines his words. He asks if I want to stop by the theater to see the play.
“No,” I say. “Yes. I think so. I may as well get every uncomfortable thing done in one night.”
“Good. There are many things to say but I’ve gone blank. I promise I’ll think of them by tomorrow.”
“Me too,” I say.
“It’s noisy where you are.”
I consult the street. Still empty. The leafless trees are silent. “Don’t tell him I’m coming.”
He promises he won’t then tells me the lead is having trouble understanding “the whole parakeet thing. She doesn’t get why a young girl would be obsessed with them.” He pauses, wanting me to explain. But I’m not an expert on anything, especially myself.
We hang up and I plan. I will ride the train to the Long Island Inn and take a bath. Tomorrow, I will see my estranged brother and hope the binding spell that grips me will unhate me by the evening.
Grandmother, I pray, release me.
A tremor beneath the sidewalk rattles the cans. The ground undulates, so soon after the phone call that I think Adrian must be involved. Metal planters clatter on a nearby stoop as if in an earthquake. But New York doesn’t have earthquakes, I think, holding on to a railing. It must be the subway.
A hulking form made from a vaulting rod attached to smaller rods prows around the corner several blocks away. Its features emerge—a jib comes into view, then a boom, an announcement preceding the full measure. A ship! Glowing blue and real. The vessel takes up the asphalt but its borders are suggestions, quivering harmlessly through parked cars as it moves toward me. Its masts loom over the apartment buildings. Its sails wobble elegantly in some other world’s breeze, illuminating the buildings it passes through. Branches of trees and stars glint through its portholes as if its cargo is the woods at night. I widen my stance as the full rush hits then moves through me like strong-willed water. I open my eyes to a pellucid world. The garbage cans shimmer in a conceptual form. The trees are ideas of trees. I hear traffic several streets away as the ship populates me. I immediately yearn for the shock after it passes—this must be love. I who never give much or chase anything give chase down the street. Its masts and banners unfurl yet cause no wake on the asphalt so I am its wake, yelling hey, and hey, and hey! The ship accelerates. Hull fades. I halt, afraid that in my pursuit I’ll miss whatever’s left. The ship ambles around the corner, sails rippling once more, portholes flash then die. The mainmasts shine over the rooftops on the opposite street before gliding into another world, leaving me hammering and devastated, alone again with the other discards on the sidewalk where good and bad people have piled their trash.
A PLAY HAS NO PAST TENSE
My mother is being played by an understudy.
Wicked flu or something screwy with shellfish, Adrian guesses, filling me in as he leads me through the theater’s nothing spaces—a chain of empty hallways, a staircase, a room whose sole purpose appears to be hosting a fire extinguisher, until we arrive in the open air of backstage.
I sit on a stool where I can remain hidden but see the action. The first act is over. The stage resets. On the house side, audience members talk in clusters while the parakeets perform a skit. This intermission play is borrowed from Shakespeare, related loosely if at all to the rest of the story. One bird delivers a monologue about the technology age. A bit with a phone, a tussle for laughs.
Adrian stage-manages around the city’s theaters, surfing the theatrical seasons, in addition to representing my brother. Any theater company wishing to produce one of Tom’s plays, especially Parakeet, his most lauded, must sign lengthy riders specifying nonnegotiable terms. No word may be changed in the dialogue, no genders switched, no actors doubled. My brother won’t allow the interpretation commonly practiced in the plays of Shak
espeare, even though he grew up obsessed with him, insisting I call him “the bard.” As a boy he’d deliver urgent monologues, pronouncing each anon, forsooth, good sir with the solemnity of a priest, the crotch of the thick tights he’d steal from me ballooned against his thigh like a tumor.
My brother refuses interviews and has sent Adrian in his stead so many times that people suspect Adrian is the actual author of the plays—a Marlowe-ian mistake that no doubt delights Tom. Our estrangement has always devastated Adrian though he respects it with polite deference, like excusing oneself around a pointed table that takes up the entire room.
After the skit, the parakeets vanish into the array of curtains that flank the stage. They pass me and move deeper into the flats, an impulse of feathers. Adrian points above our heads, where they reemerge on the catwalk. The trembling of the floor as the stage activates to a new setting could be my heart as I wait to be unmoored by whatever appears.
In the play my name is Luna and I am an only child. There are four Lunas in Parakeet: Luna at eight, Luna at fourteen, Luna at twenty-three, and Luna present day, the “narrator.”
Lights up on coffee shop. Luna at twenty-three arrives for her shift. Her coworker tunes in to a rock station. The thrum of music being flipped past comes through the overhead speakers. An arguing couple enters.
The overall effect of this faux shop is dustier, meant to evoke gritty realism, I’d guess. Tom wouldn’t have known certain details. The radio was tuned to Yuna’s favorite cooking show. The couple was not arguing, but asking each other what flavor ice cream they wanted in that way some couples have that invites others in. Ironically, my brother has omitted the writer, who had spent the previous week grousing over an award that was given to a woman he considered undeserving. I’m grateful for the buffer these differences create that enables me to pretend I’m watching the worst day of someone else’s life. Memory follows the logic of a dream or poem. Even as the half-accurate scene plays, I recall details obscured by time. Yuna planned to attempt macarons that weekend and promised to bring some in for us. I am the only person on earth who knows this.
Though I’ve never seen Parakeet, I’ve read every write-up. The dimensions of the set’s dinner table, around which all plot points occur, is specified in contract pages the potential director must initial. As the scenes tick by, Luna collects more stuffed animals. When the animals enter in the last scene, they are to be ordered in a way that is also specified. The birds must be with the birds, the horses and zebras together. A director cannot substitute a dog for a fish.
Many articles speculate about Tom’s retreat from public life. He’s an organization helmed by committee, a criminal, a group of women. Much has been written about why he won’t permit interpretation of Parakeet. That he believes in time-capsule art, that he is a misogynist maestro. They’re all wrong. Baffled companies who want to produce this odd, violent heart of a play are not being held to the specifications of a playwright, but of a little girl.
We were hypersensitive, sickly kids, constantly made fun of in school. Every day my classmates reminded me I was different though there was little chance I’d forget. They’d mark my out-loud face as if doing me a favor: Your eyebrows are joined, they’d say. Your calves are not shaped the way mine are. Your mother looks like an Arab spy.
My mother demanded silence, but when we were together Tom and I were feral. One night, frustrated by our noise, she booted the door down and hurled handfuls of my stuffed animals into trash bags. Tom stood between her and them and widened his stance so he could not be moved. My mother backhanded him against the corner of a bureau.
The next morning, she dragged the bags to the curb. She seemed sheepish, no longer certain, but perhaps felt trapped by her passion the previous night. It was Saturday, when other families stenciled their walls or crocheted. I don’t know what other families do. But I know our trash day was Tuesday because I watched the bags that held my animals get rained on for two and a half days, imagining them clinging to one another for warmth.
Three crows, two zebras, one whale, a handful of ladybugs, one unicorn with metallic wings, three horses—one pink, one green, one realistically colored—two butterflies, three bears including the one we got free with a wiper blade change, a dolphin from the aquarium class trip we lied to go to, convincing my mother she signed the permission slip while she dozed on the recliner after my brother made us a simple meal. Finally, four parakeets arranged up front, who were the young Luna’s—my—favorites.
Place the walrus next to the puppy. The raccoon comes after the bear. The hush of human voices on the other side of the curtain, amplified and immediate. I had prepared for cruelty but not for this tender thought: Tom has returned my animals to me. They will never be out of order again.
The Man from the Coffee Shop enters and every conciliatory sentiment fades. Tom’s gotten it wrong again. When the man entered in real life, no one noticed. There is no memory in a play. A play is always present tense. I am newly injured in real time.
* * *
After final curtain, Adrian and I climb the back steps to a shared dressing room. The Lunas are at the snack table, piling meat onto sturdy rolls. They say, Hey Luna, what’s up there, Luna. When we enter, Luna at every age turns her eyes to me.
There is my grandmother in period clothes, tapping sand off her boot on a fake fireplace.
There is my mother’s understudy, eating turkey on rye, half shucked from its wax paper. She offers me a sandwich, more mother than my real one.
Adrian introduces us and does not mention that without me none of them would be ten floors above Broadway, dragging baby oil–doused cotton balls over their eyelids. The director, a diminutive woman in massive glasses, asks to speak to Adrian. The cast exhibits the intimacy of weeks of constant contact, forgetting me to debate phone warranties, a sweater they should’ve bought. They have evolved into their roles. The director’s monologue runs under the current yet I hear parts of it. She is still not getting— Present Day Luna, who refuses to— It’s in the contract, even— Being stubborn, don’t you think? And who, anyway? Talk to her.
As I wait for Adrian to finish I feel exposed and ratty and murderous toward my brother. I want him to show so I can punish him.
“I was hoping I’d meet the playwright,” I tell my understudy mother.
She shakes her head. “Never comes to the shows. Notorious. We thought for opening night, at least. A real kook, I hear.” Her eyes widen. “I’m sorry. I’m an understudy.”
Adrian returns and announces that he and I will head to the diner to get a drink and wait for the others. He whispers to me that the donor dinner is wrapping up and we can expect to hear more soon.
On the empty stage, Present Day Luna stops us. She wears a silk kimono and smiles when we are introduced before proceeding with the errand she has with Adrian. The director wants to see her, she’s going to say that thing again? Do you think it’s right?
As Adrian listens, he checks me with an occasional glance. He is a bank where others invest their valuables. If he turns out to be trustworthy, which he almost always is, they increase their investment. Adrian assures Present Day Luna that what awaits her is nothing she can’t handle. He and I escape to the cold street.
We secure a few tables at the diner. Glass of wine for me and scotch for him. We’re alone. The years have lined his eyes and mouth as if he has deepened into himself.
“Are you as ready as you can be?” he says.
“Am I ready?” Parakeets arrive in street clothes, still wearing their wings. I slide to make room. They are named for the fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed, and Moth.
My grandmother arrives, having transformed into a sweet-faced girl with gray hair dye collected at her temples. Stagehands. A woman who identifies herself as Mary from the office. “I’m in charge of sales.”
The director is not coming, someone says, because she and one of the Lunas are having a talk.
“Wh
ich Luna?” Moth says.
“Present Day,” the girl says, like it’s obvious.
Everyone says they know what that’s about. Everyone knows that the father won’t come because he’s not the type to hang out. “He’s probably upside down in a dungeon,” Mary says. Everyone agrees. But then my father enters from the cold, bracing a parakeet head against his side like a fullback holds a football. What timing! The actors cheer. We had just counted you out yet here you are!
I am a secret here, but it’s difficult for me to resist giving notes to my “grandmother.” She was proud of her nose, I want to tell the girl. She was always touching it while talking.
My phone rings. It is the florist. Again, I’ve forgotten to stop in to see the mock-up. My thoughtlessness has baffled her polite. “When you originally said you’d pick it up instead of having it sent, I hope you’ll recall, I expressed my opinion that I didn’t think it was a good idea.” The actors guffaw at someone’s joke. I plug my ear with a forefinger.
“But you said,” she continues, “‘I’ll be in the city, no bother at all.’”
“Please don’t do my voice,” I say. “That’s mean.”
“I’m sorry. I’m at a loss.”
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“What if you don’t like it?”
“I’m sure it’s fine. Look,” I say. “I don’t care.”
“Queen Anne’s lace.”
I realize that she cares, it’s her craft on the line. “Sounds beautiful.” I hang up and apologize to the table of actors and crew.
“We’re very lucky to have her here,” Adrian says. “She’s getting married on Saturday.”
The actors applaud. Cobweb claps and hops in place.
Mary from sales asks where, how big, what time? As I answer, the parakeet sitting next to me shifts and huffs. Mary tells me that the best decision she ever made was choosing high cocktail tables for her wedding. Low ones are bullshit, she lists reasons. Normally the tendency of people like Mary from sales to give unsolicited lectures on menial subjects annoys me. Tonight, it seems quaint, benevolent.
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